Twisted Heights is a unique local co-op puzzle game in which you take on the role of frog adventurers climbing an unstable tower in search for The Golden Hat. In order to progress, you and your fellow adventurers will have to solve puzzles while using the weight of objects to keep the tower from crashing to the ground.
Twisted Heights was made by 6 artists, 3 designers, and 3 programmers at PlaygroundSquad as the final project.
I was responsible for one of the core features of this game; the tower movement. Each object on top of a platform would contribute to the weight of the tower, applying a rotational force in the appropriate direction.
To simulate physics, an object would be heavier on the platform the further out from the center it is. For leniency, a dead zone was also set up in the center of the platform. Objects inside of this zone would not apply any weight at all. In addition to this, I also made the tower crash to the ground if tilted beyond a certain angle.
Since one of the early decisions in the project was to allow external forces to obstruct the player movement, I made it fully physics-based.
The movement system always used the current tilt level of the tower to decide the movement speed in a certain direction along the platform, and if the tower reached a certain tilt level, the player starts to slide off, making movement more challenging.
The player could throw objects by either bumping, or grabbing and letting go of them while walking in a direction. When an object is thrown, it follows a quadratic bezier curved path to its destination until it hits the terrain.
I also implemented an automatic lock-on if certain conditions were set, this in order to make it easier to hit interactable targets such as buttons. Also worth noting that players were considered throwable objects, which allowed for some chaotic and fun gameplay.
When the last remaining player touches the golden hat, a cinematic starts playing, in which the camera zooms into the player, to then transition into the credits.
The camera zooming made use of easing and bezier curves to define a smooth curved path towards the player. The spline would need separate control points depending on the player position and rotation in order to make sure that the cinematic was visually appealing.
When the players reached the top floor, the game mode suddenly turns into a battle royale. The players had to bump each other off the tower, and the last one standing would acquire the golden hat.